How to Take Notes in Medical School Using Notion | KharmaMedic

[Music] what is up guys karma medic here and welcome back to another dose in today's video i want to talk about how it is that i take my notes as a fourth year medical student studying at king's college london because i've realized this has changed quite a bit as i've progressed through medical school i'm gonna break up this video into two parts the first of which is showing you and explaining to you how it is that i take my notes and why i think that my note-taking method is valuable and then in the second part of the video i'm gonna run through some real-time live examples of me taking these notes so that you can see how it is that i do it so now as a fourth year medical student i'm currently two years into my clinical rotations two years of being in the hospital talking to patients carrying out physical tasks and clinical exams and so the vast majority of my learning comes from being in that physical environment so the vast majority of knowledge about diseases their underlying pathologies treatments and things like that i should have already learned and studied in my first three years of medical school and the evidence for me having learned and studied all this knowledge is hundreds and hundreds of handwritten notes that i've taken on my ipad which i've uploaded to notability and synced across all of my devices so that the information is readily available to me whenever i need it now what i usually do year after year is once my lectures and tutorials start i listen to or watch them and then start taking handwritten notes again on my ipad after i write down my lecture notes i would read and study them and then write a condensed version of those notes read and study the condensed version and then again write down another condensed version of those notes and repeat the process over and over again until i've distilled my notes down to just the most important facts and pieces of information now the good thing about this technique is that one it reinforces my learning and memory by forcing me to physically write out the information each time and two that's pretty much it the negative things about using this technique is that as i'm sure you know if you've written lecture notes before it takes a long long time and i've actually already written this material somewhere else in my handwritten notes if you take any one of the major clinical diseases in medicine for example rheumatoid arthritis copd heart failure diabetes any of these major topics i've probably written notes on them at least four or five times in completely different places and so now if i'm writing down notes on those topics again i'm just duplicating them i'm repeating effort that i've already done before and then the third bad thing about this method of note-taking is that it's extremely extremely passive it involves very little active learning you have to really force yourself to think about what it is that you're writing out in order to have that active component of learning as a result of all of this when i started my fourth year of medical school i decided that i was going to take no more handwritten notes no more rewriting the same topic disease pathology whatever over and over again so this brings me on to my active method of learning now in my fourth year of medical school which is doing past paper questions and reviewing old notes that i've written in notability so at this point i'm using information that i gain from past paper questions and from already existing banks of knowledge that are already there on the internet i'm literally copy pasting them into my own categorized organized method of notes and learning from there i've decided that rewriting out all that information for me personally i think is going to be a waste of time now this begs the question of why do i think that past paper questions are the best way for me to learn as a fourth year medical student first of all they forced me to actively recall pieces of information that i've already learned before that are stored somewhere deep in my brain if i read a question and then google the answer and write it down that's not going to make me actually think about the question and try and retrieve that information from my brain going through that process of trying to dig through the information in your brain is what helps build those strong connections with that factor with that knowledge or with that explanation or whatever it is that you're trying to remember the second thing is that past paper questions are extremely relevant and hyper focused around two things one what it is that i need to know in order to pass and excel in my medical school exams and two most of the information is directly relevant to what i need to know for clinical practice as a future doctor the reason certain topics are frequently tested in question banks and in past paper questions is because those are the topics that are going to be most important for clinical practice in the future now i know there's obviously a whole bunch of questions that are purely memorization based factory call etc most of the questions that you'll find in a question bank are actually good fair questions that get you thinking about different presentations differential diagnoses clinical exams whatever it is the third thing is that past paper questions or question banks really help you cut through the noise of all the information that exists in medicine for example this is a book that's probably quite common within medical circles it's called clinical medicine by kumar and clark this is the big version it is absolutely massive and huge now i'm sure that all of the information in this book is very interesting helpful and useful but in terms of what you actually need to know in order to practice good medicine as a doctor in a hospital it's not every single thing that's in this book and so what i find past paper questions really help do is cut through this noise and tell you what are the most important things that you need to focus on for example if i realize in past paper questions that the topic of heart failure comes up very often then i will know that heart failure is an important topic of course having been to the hospital i know that there are a lot of patients with heart failure and so what i can do is i can go to the heart failure part of this book and i can read it in intense detail but a lot of the other things in this book like poori faria cutanea tarda i don't need to know in this much detail i need to know very simple facts and pieces of information about which question banks will do very well for me so yeah past paper questions really help you narrow down and focus on what the most important what the most common topics and diagnoses and diseases are and then the fourth thing is that question banks have a lot of metadata that no other type of studying provides for you what i mean by metadata is for example how well you're performing against the average student who's taking the exact same questions as you how well you're performing in different sections or systems of the body rest cardio endocrinology whatever you can even see your progress over time and it sort of helps you identify what your weaknesses and your strengths are if you find that you're scoring 19 95 in the cardiology section but maybe 60 or 70 in rest then you know that you need to read up more and study more on the respiratory section and then some question banks like the one that i use even has a comment section and the great thing about a comment section is that it is a collection of students going through the exact same thing as you if you found that question hard to answer then chances are a bunch of other people did too and then people who didn't find it so hard to answer will comment letting you know what their methods of memorization or what their learning and understanding is of that topic and i usually find that the comment section is very very helpful it also has some great banter which i'm sure we'll see later on in the video i've always known this as a student but as i enter my eighth year oh god eighth year of education across two different universities i realized this more than ever which is that studying lecture notes tutorials talking to your friends watching youtube videos whatever it is is about half of the work it's half of the studying that you need to do the other half is actually putting all of that work and studying into practice by doing practice questions or past paper exams and quite simply for me the single biggest regret i have for when i wrote my usm lee step one earlier this year in the summer is that i didn't do more practice questions because i know for a fact that if i had done more practice questions i would have scored better than i did all right so that's the end of my ramble about why it is that i think past paper questions are an excellent way to study for medical school exams now let me show you exactly how it is that i do this all right so this is my note-taking method as a fourth year medical student i've got past medicine which is a question bank on the left half of my screen and notion which is where i harbor all my notes on the different conditions that i need to know in medical school on the right half and a big thank you to notion for sponsoring this video if you don't know notion is a completely free app that you can use to organize pretty much anything in your life whether that's your projects your schoolwork your to-do lists literally anything i personally use it to manage my entire youtube workflow from coming up with ideas scripting them writing down notes from my podcast i also use it for everything to do with my medical school keeping track of lecture notes to-do lists bigger projects essays research work etc and also my daily to-do lists my larger life to-do list and bigger projects i use the app every single day and find it extremely useful if you want to try out notion for yourself i'll leave links in the description down below where you can download it and try it out for free thanks again to notion and back to the video one of the best things about this question bank is that they have a textbook within this textbook you can click this button over here and it will actually sort pieces of information based on how important they are or how often they show up on exams now a lot of you might be thinking yeah nasser these do show up less often on exams but they're also important for clinical practice and you should know them as a doctor and i completely agree with you however at the same time the things that show up more often on exams are the things that are more important or relevant for clinical practice because they are more common or important in clinical practice so if you're pressed for time for an upcoming exam or you need to be as efficient as possible in your studying sorting out the information that you want to review like this is a good way of doing that so as you can see here on the right i have all the different topics or systems that i need to know for medicine organized quite neatly into these different pages and within each of them i have subheadings and more pages with more information on each of these specific topics now all the information that you see here pretty much everything that has been put into these different categories has been directly copy pasted from the past medicine question bank and the review textbook so within each one of these pages i'll read through the information try to understand it and figure out what's actually going on highlight different pieces of information put things in bold use different colors whatever it is i need to do to sort of help refresh my memory on this topic or learn it from scratch and then usually at the top as well i'll write things in my own words what i think was most important that i took away from this information and this way the vast majority of the studying that i do is active it's reading questions thinking about information trying to fit different pieces of the puzzle together and then the note-taking aspect is a much smaller percentage of my time i think this will probably be a lot easier if i just show you so let's get started with that see this first question what blood results would be in keeping with your suspected diagnosis you suspect he may have hemochromatosis and take some bloods alright so hemochromatosis is what it is a condition where you have excess levels of iron in the body you have too much iron in the body and you can't store it properly and so it leaks into places where it shouldn't be for example the testicles or the liver and i think in the brain as well so it can cause some neurological problems what blood results would i expect with this so transferrin is used to transfer iron around the body if we have tons and tons of iron in the body we have an overload of iron then i'm going to say that transferrin is going to be high ferritin ferritin is the storage of iron in the body if we have an overload of iron i'm going to expect ferritin to be high as well tibc refers to how much the body is looking for iron so if we're iron deficient then tibc will be high that's what i remember so now it must be low so transfer in high fahrenheit and tibc low nice that way i've sort of worked through the question i've managed to arrive at the right answer which is great especially since i'm doing this live on camera so the first important thing that happened there is i had to think really long and hard about a whole bunch of different aspects of medicine in order to arrive at the right question if i was simply taking notes on hemochromatosis okay hemochromatosis is a lot of iron a lot of iron means you'll get these blood levels then i won't be actively thinking about the information i won't be trying to suck it in and absorb it and learn it and remember it now that i've learned this very valuable piece of information i know that we're talking about hemochromatosis so i'm going to go back to my conditions and i'm going to put in hemochromatosis hemochromatosis is what kind of fits in a lot of different places but let's go with metabolism so the first thing that i do is i copy paste all this information that the question bank provides me with on hemochromatosis all right as you saw when i was answering this question i already know a decent amount about hemochromatosis and enough in order to answer that question correctly so all these notes here i'm going to read through but i'm going to scan through them i'm not going to read them in super intense detail i'm not going to try and like understand every single aspect of it if i read something that's new that's different that i haven't heard of before or that i think is important i will write it up over here in caps lock at the same time i'm going to highlight pieces of information here that i think are important so let's do just that so what was the main learning point about this okay investigations will show so those are the main lab results that i'm going to see and i'll highlight them in i don't want to do green i want to do red or yellow actually for investigations so i know that this is the important information that i took away from this question so now i'm going to read through the information and look for other important things that i need to know sort of iron absorption metabolism i guess i put it in the right in the right place caused by inheritance hfe okay on chromosome 6. so anything that i highlight in yellow has to do with investigations anything i highlight in green has to do with treatment or management anything in red is something very important and anything written in caps lock or bold is obviously something very important as well now you'll see as i go through my notes i try and do this color coding as often as possible but i'm not going to lie some of the times i'm just really not bothered i'll highlight a piece of information and color it something whatever the color is just so that i can have it colored and know that it's important in the future so that's just a quick example of how i would take the information that i learned or that i already knew from a past paper question and put it into my notes the last thing i do before i move on to the next question is i check the comment section but there's no comment section on this question so on to the next one all right so again starting with the final sentence of the question given the likely diagnosis which imaging is like to be diagnostic i can't answer based on the sentence so i need to read this first what's going to be diagnostic so sensorineural hearing loss means it's not conductive it's something to do with the nerves anything that sort of doesn't show me soft tissue connective tissue type things is not going to be very useful for me autoscopy you're not going to be able to see anything to do with sensorineural hearing loss doppler ultrasound is going to be for blood flow unless there's not enough blood flow to unnerve i'm not sure that's going to help me too much x-ray of the head is going to show me physical structures so don't think that'll help either i think it's either ct head or mri of the cpa i know that this uh piece of anatomy is involved in hearing loss but i'm trying to remember why it's for a schwannoma so a brain tumor that grows at this specific place can affect hearing loss or it can affect hearing loss the only thing is i would expect this stem to be showing me or leading me towards something that shows that this patient might have like neurological symptoms because of a mass growing in her brain that would lead me to a tumor gonna go with this great happy i knew that and there we go the main important learning point here is that acoustic neuromas i think otherwise known as schwannomas are best visualized by an mri of the cpa so i got to the thing that they were trying to get me to look at or think about in this question and again i had to actively recall that piece of information from something that i did while i was studying for my step one exam so let's see if i can find that neurology so somewhere in these notes i will have written about the cerebellar pontine angle a schwannoma in the brain schwannoma classically at the cerebellopontine angle so i have these notes somewhere i've written them down before and i don't want to go and keep writing it down a hundred times here we go hearing loss tinnitus and ataxia the stem mentioned hearing loss and tinnitus and i said that i wish the stem had told me something else some other neurological sign that would indicate a tumor in the brain which is ataxia so i know this information i've written it down before i've learned it i've studied it and so i don't want to go ahead and keep writing it over and over again now what i'm going to do is take away this very important information so a vestibular solanoma is a tumor but i wouldn't necessarily put it under my categories of oncology because that's more for like cancers cancer cancers so instead i'm going to put this in neuro under tumors and i don't think i have a page for tumors so i'm going to make a new one like i said i know almost all this information already so now i'm just going to read it i'm going to scan through it and see what i think is most important so ninety percent of cerebellar pontine angle tumors very important because that's how i arrived at the answer to the question classical history is vertigo hearing loss tinnitus and an absent corneal reflex so that's part of the triad from my previous notes that i didn't have now this is quite important which i hadn't remembered properly so it can affect these cranial nerves 8 five and seven so again since this is important i am going to highlight it and now i'm going to read it and try and understand it and remember it so now another piece of information that i know is important because i've studied this before is this here so i'm going to highlight it i know it's going to come up on the exam at some point this is quite good management urgent referral to ent it's likely to come up on my exam so i'm going to highlight it as well so like i said last thing that i do is i check the comment section because either there's going to be something really funny which is going to make me laugh and make studying this a little bit funner or there's going to be some useful piece of information there written by other students that i can use in my own notes so can someone explain why this can't just be meniere's disease i didn't even consider meniere's disease as a differential diagnosis maybe i should have because 14 other people also consider this to be meniere's disease so let me read about why it might be that differential you expect to get all other symptoms veneers oral fullness episodic in nature distance vertigo sphere patient can't function okay so probably the reason i didn't consider it as a differential is because it was missing all these things however now i can go to my meniere's disease note where i say ear nose and throat here and here's the disease put the information here and so now i have written more notes and added more notes to some other topic that i hadn't even considered before alright and then you usually also get a couple salty comments from people who think that the question wasn't good honestly i don't care if the question is good or not if it's in a question bank if it's a piece of information that i need to know there's no point being salty or not either know it or i don't i learn and i move on now that we've seen the comment section we can move on to the next question i think i'll do one more question on camera and then we'll call it for this video because it's been getting quite long okay since this question is very similar to the first one it might be something different but since it's similar i'll do i'll do a different one all right so i see a picture what's the most likely diagnosis kind of need to read this time i'll be honest with you i have absolutely no idea polymorphic eruption of pregnancy never heard that before pumpholics i've never heard that before herpes gestationus never heard that before it sounds made up but usually when something sounds made up it turns out to be the right answer anyway lycan planus i think is more of a vaginal disease not around the umbilicus i'm guessing either way so let's let's just go with this word that i've never heard of before okay it was wrong 72 got it right here's a good example of a question i've gotten wrong where i knew absolutely nothing about what this was so i'm going to go down to the bottom what is this topic skin disorders associated with pregnancy so i'm going to go to my absent gynae i'm going to go under obs i'm going to write page skin conditions all right associated with pregnancy so i'm going to copy paste this information and i'm going to read through it and try and learn it and understand it atopic eruption of pregnancy 72 of people who answered this question got it right so clearly it's more common knowledge than i would have expected that i thought so i'm going to put it in bold and i'm going to highlight it because clearly it's important management is usually asked about so i will put this here and i guess this is an example of what it looks like the important thing is that i've learned a new piece of information okay i've highlighted or made in bold whatever i think is important and so now next time pregnancy skin condition comes up i will hopefully have some information about it to help me answer the question so that's everything that i wanted to talk about in this video hopefully i've explained why it is that i like to use question banks and notion as a note-taking method in my fourth year of medical school and why i find it valuable and hopefully you've also seen how it is that i read and interpret a question extract important information and take notes from them if you've got any comments or feedback or there's anything you'd like to let me know please do in a comment down below otherwise i'll catch you in the next one peace [Music] let's wait for the ambulance to pass okay i think it's far enough this is what happens when you don't record a video for a couple of weeks no emails go away go away i'm explaining things now going i don't need you right now progressive cerebellar hv in first year of life telangiectasia skin lesions dilated blood vessels and ears nose face neck icy immunocompromised so increased infection all right so i can still read these

Channel: Kharma Medic

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Keywords: KharmaMedic, how I take notes, how I take notes in medical school, how I take notes using notion, study with me, notion, notion note taking, note taking methods, note taking, how to take notes, how I take my notes, how to make smart notes, note taking tip, how to make good notes, notes on notion, notion tour, notion tutorial, how to use notion, how I use notion, notes in notion, how to take notes in medical school, notion for students, take notes with notion, notion setup

Id: cXxn3-We2Ww

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021